Tupelo Hassman's 'Girlchild' stuns in its telling of life in a trailer park: New in Paperback

People should pick up Tupelo Hassman's debut novel, Girlchild for a slew of reasons, but plot isn't one of them. Not much happens, but in a teenage narrator's voice that stunned me on page one, "Girlchild" offers an unrelenting portrait of life in the Calle, a Reno, Nevada, trailer park.

Rory Dawn Hendricks sees herself as the "feebleminded daughter of a feebleminded daughter, herself the product of feebleminded stock," but she is determined to leave the Calle, a place where men "hunt and trap everything from birds to stray hubcaps to small girls, using slingshots, shotguns, and the rustle of candy wrappers."

Rory's experiences form a sometimes devastating anthropological study of Calle life. Hassman employs a few gimmicks -- Rory studies the "Girl Scout Handbook," for instance -- and "Girlchild" sometimes seems more collage than novel with sections from diaries, social worker reports and police records.

Still, Rory's ferocity reminded me of Justin Torres' "We the Animals," another moving debut distinguished by its captivating voice. Like Torres, Hassman builds enough good will to propel me from "Girlchild" to whatever she writes next.

Beautiful Souls

Eyal Press

Picador, 196 pp., $15

Subtitled "The Courage and Conscience of Ordinary People in Extraordinary Times," Press' book examines "why, even in situations of seemingly total conformity, there are always some people who refuse to go along."

Press presents four case studies to offer insight in understanding "what impels people to do something risky and transgressive when thrust into a morally compromising situation: stop, say no, resist."

He offers the stories of a Swiss police commander who falsified documents to help Jewish refuges flee Austria in 1938, a Serbian soldier who saved Croatians who were going to be tortured or executed during the Serbo-Croatian wars of the 1990s, an Israeli soldier who refused to serve in the West Bank, and a financial adviser who brought attention to the way her company was defrauding investors.

As Press explains, "We've all arrived at junctures where our deepest principles collide with the loyalties we harbor and the duties we are expected to fulfill, and wrestled with how far to go to keep our conscience clean. As far as necessary to stay true to ourselves, a voice inside our heads tells us. But there are other voices that warn against turning on our community, embarrassing our superiors, or endangering our careers and reputations, maybe even our lives and the lives of our family members."

Through his examples, Press demonstrates that "it is never easy to say no, particularly in extreme situations, but it is always possible."

In The Washington Post, Michael S. Roth said that reading "Beautiful Souls" makes "us wonder if we would have the strength to act against the crowd, and in so doing spread a bit of light in our own dark times."

While "there are enormous differences between saving lives in a war zone and exposing corruption in a financial services firm," Roth said, "Press shows that in these various contexts, people break ranks with those around them because they share a deeper allegiance to social values that go beyond the immediate situation. Their ability to say 'no' comes from their histories of saying 'yes,' of committing themselves to social ideals worth fighting for. Cynicism and ironic distance play no role in these quiet heroes' decisions to swim against the tide."

In The New York Times, Mark Oppenheimer was also quick to note that Press "propounds no new theories" and "offers no prescription for how to become courageous." Still, Oppenheimer said that the book feels essential as "a hymn to the mystery of disobedience.

"What makes you eager to push this book into the hands of the next person you meet," he explained, "are the small, still moments, epics captured in miniature."

Press' four main case studies, Oppenheimer found, "capture how the price of moral courage is often not dramatic condemnation, not the martyr's posthumous exaltation, but a lifelong sentence to sit apart, with no chance for appeal."

The Invisible Arab

Marwan Bishara

Nation, 284 pp., $15.99

Bishara, Al Jazeera's senior political analyst, subtitles his book, "The Promise and Perils of the Arab Revolutions." In examining the recent series of revolutions through Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Yemen and Syria, he offers an extended essay "about the fall and rise of the Arabs" and attempts "to understand how their revolution evolved, what went right, why it is paramount, and how it could still go terribly wrong."

"The Invisible Arabs" counters what Bishara sees as the Arab Spring narrative in much of the world's media, which puts forth the idea that "an oppressed people who have suffered passively suddenly decide that enough is enough and, thanks to Western technology and inspiration, spontaneously rise up to reclaim their freedom, inspiring what is called the Arab Spring."

As Bishara explains, however, this revolution "was a long time coming," the "culmination of a long social and political struggle – countless sit-ins, strikes, pickets, and demonstrations by people who risked and suffered intimidation, torture, and imprisonment."

While the Arab revolution may sound like others throughout modern history, Bishara argues that "the Arab Spring is exclusively Arab," and his book traces the revolution's roots "by looking at the complex factors peculiar to Arab society as well as the universal influences that made it possible."

Newsweek praised Bishara for providing "one of the first regionwide assessments of the Arab Spring" and noted that he avoids "the pitfall of seeing the revolution in isolation" as he "elegantly charts how the potent forces of nationalism, Islamism, and Western intervention all mixed" to prompt the various revolutions.

Kirkus Reviews labeled the book "a keen, journalistic look at the making of the Arab Spring and its ramifications."

Publishers Weekly also enjoyed this "compelling and spirited history of the modern Arab nation," finding Bishara's work "fast-paced, impassioned, and eloquent."

New Finnish Grammar

Diego Marani; translated Judith Landry

Melville House, 192 pp., $15.95

Marani's novel begins in 1943 in Trieste, a seaport in northeastern Italy, where a seriously wounded, unconscious man wearing a Finnish uniform is discovered on the quay. His only identification is a name stitched into his jacket collar.

When the man regains consciousness, he has no memory, and in narrating his story, he explains, "I did not try to talk because I simply did not feel the need. All linguistic feeling, all interest in words, had died away. I could not speak any language, I no longer knew which was my own. But I was unaware of this: a subtle veil, like a form of hypnosis, was shielding me from the violent colours of reality."

Soon, the stranger is forced to go "home" to Helsinki, with the hope that he will be able to gather enough information to have a better understanding of his life, but his search becomes more complicated as the Nazis and Russians prepare to stage a major battle.

Reviewing the novel for The Guardian, a U.K. paper, Nicholas Lezard was full of admiration. "I can't remember when I read a more extraordinary novel," he said, "or when I was last so strongly tempted to use the word 'genius' of its author."

While Marani's set-up reminded the critic of Michael Ondaatje's "The English Patient," Lezard thought "New Finnish Grammar" is "far more profound and far less stylistically irritating and inflated with self-esteem. This is a novel which wants to say what it has to say at its own pace, but without overstaying its welcome."

For Lezard, the novel is "about the madness of war, the importance of love ('without someone else beside us, watching us live, we might as well be dead'), about memory and forgetting, about the tragedy of existence."

These subjects, he went on to say, "are handled so subtly and naturally, occurring so inevitably in the narrative that all I can do, unless I go away and think about it for two weeks, a luxury unavailable to this reviewer, is simply to tell you to read it, and brace yourself for something special."

On Three Percent, a web site run in part by the University of Rochester's translation program, Daniel Hahn said, "There is nothing easy and nothing obvious about 'New Finnish Grammar,' a translated book about language, a story narrated by a man without an identity or a voice--a tremendously difficult thing to achieve, and here pulled off admirably."

Hahn observed that the "thread of intense language acquisition, more than anything, is the unlikely genius of this book, and in particular Judith Landry's translation; in the carefully tidied-up voice of a language-less first-person, it weaves syntactical reflections through one man's most basic experience of trying to create an identity."

What They Do in the Dark

Amanda Coe

W.W. Norton, 250 pp., $14.99

Coe is a screenwriter whose credits include the British series "Shameless," a comedy-drama that centers on the British underclass. Her debut novel maintains that focus, but hones a far darker picture of life through its story of two 10-year-old girls growing up in northern England in the 1970s.

While Gemma comes from a wealthy family that can take her on Spanish holidays, Pauline steals to survive in near-squalor. Their friendship deepens when Gemma's mother leaves to be with someone else, and the young girls bond over fantasies involving a child television star, Lallie. Those fantasies reach new levels when Lallie visits their hometown for a movie shoot.

The Atlantic listed Coe's "arresting and disturbing debut" as one of the best books of last year.

The magazine's reviewer found that "the grubby hardness of the 1970s, with its pervasive cigarette smoke, its greasy foods and sugary drinks ('the so-called hot chocolate, with its sweet, powdery bottom layer and topping of tepid purple foam'), is an ideal medium for this story's underlying creepiness."

The reviewer noted that "the novel falters in the sections devoted to an American producer whose vapidity, suspect in the hands of an English author, makes her tedious." Still, this flaw seems minor when "Coe's rendering of the casual way in which adults continually put their own interests ahead of the children who depend on them rings chillingly true."

Pointing to Coe's credits as a screenwriter, the magazine's reviewer observed that the novel's "tight structure and exquisite tension-building throughout might be expected," but Coe's "pitch-perfect, unsentimental evocation of the pleasures, confusions, yearnings, and vulnerabilities of girls is what makes this a stunningly accomplished novel."

"Writers like Amanda Coe are few and far between," Wertheimer explained, " and "What They Do in the Dark" is "a ferocious, combustible brew with an ending that persists long after you've put the book away.

"We know these girls," Wertheimer went on to say. "We went to school with them, and in spite of -- or because of -- that, everything they do grips our attention. All while they stealthily remind us how little control children have over their lives, even, and perhaps especially, those, like Pauline, who appear the most threatening."

This Explains Everything

Edited by John Brockman

Harper Perennial, 411 pp., $15.99

Brockman is the editor and publisher of Edge.org, an online science salon in the same realm as Ted.com. It brings together influential thinkers to tackle one broad question a year. Here, he collects the response of more than 150 luminaries addressing the question, "What is your favorite deep, elegant, or beautiful explanation?"

Like other annual books that have come from the essays on Edge.org, this one is composed of pieces that mostly clock in under three pages.

Some responses seem to be included more for their irreverence or star-power than for their ability to help a layman understand concepts of modern science. Alan Alda (who gets space for his work on PBS' "The Human Spark") pops up for a page-long essay pointing to Hamlet's notion that "There are more things in heaven and earth . . . than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

Alda acknowledges that the line "doesn't sound like an explanation," but he takes it as one that "explains the confusion and uncertainty of the universe" and "urges us on when, as they always will, our philosophies produce anomalies."

"Observe a single ant," he notes, "and it doesn't make much sense – walking in one direction, suddenly careening in another for no obvious reason, doubling back on itself. Thoroughly unpredictable. The same happens with two ants, with a handful of ants.

What's fascinating about all this, Sapolsky goes on to say, is that "there's no blueprint or central source of command." Rather than "the wisdom of the crowd," the complexity of an ant colony depends on simple behavior algorithms "that consist of a few simple rules for interacting with the local environment and local ants."

In The Boston Globe, Jan Gardner said, "If you want to increase the intellectual heft of your reading while keeping it entertaining, 'This Explains Everything' will do nicely."

Kirkus Reviews also enjoyed Brockman's "smorgasbord of ideas," but found it "best when judiciously sampled" as the essays aren't all entertaining, and, with some pieces, "general readers may struggle with the vocabulary of special fields."

As the magazine's reviewer explained, "The sheer number of contributors and the broad scope of the book ensure that most readers will find topics to pique their interest, but that same feature means that many will find themselves flipping pages quickly."

Vikas Turakhia teaches English at Orange High School in Pepper Pike, Ohio.

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